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It's interesting which prejudices we've decided are a hard "f**k no" and which ones still feel socially chic. You cannot, for example, openly mock the elderly, the sick, the overworked or the struggling. You'll be escorted off to get a wrist slap for being, well, a bit of a prick.

Mothers (and their children) on the other hand? Very much fair game.

Before the "you chose this" brigade arrives all guns blazing to inform me that having a child was in fact my decision, and you can not compare it to someone getting sick, being disabled or becoming old — you are correct.

I am aware that most mothers did not trip over a baby in the supermarket and accidentally take it home and that people who are sick, disabled or old do not typically choose to get sick, disabled or old, unless of course they have Munchausen syndrome which, well, isn't really a choice either. I get it — I do. I understand the distinction.

But "you chose this" is a fascinating loophole. And by fascinating I mean, unbelievably stupid. Because are we really suggesting that opting into something permanently revokes your right to be treated with basic regard? Does choice make you immune to loneliness, or exhaustion, or struggle?

Watch: The physical and mental changes of motherhood. Post continues below.

I ask these questions because I fell down a comment section recently that felt like a live demonstration of the loophole in action. A baptism of fire, if you will. Though less holy water and more a circle of women chanting "you chose this, and now you're fucking boring and YOU CAN'T SIT WITH US!"

To give you some background…

There I was, taking a break from working by scrolling TikTok. Because what else would I do? Go for a run? Do some stretches? Eat something nutritious? Please — I have a personality to maintain and that personality is "mind rot online with questionable posture".

Up popped a video. A woman walking alone with her pram through empty woods with the caption: "Me on a walk with all my friends who were excited to become aunts."

Now, as someone who doesn't have loads of friends myself and as someone who needs to inspect comment sections because I like to self-harm, I opened them. And I was… surprised. But also not surprised.

Not surprised at the overt disdain for mothers — we got the memo on that one. But surprised that it was essentially a comment section full of young (currently or forever, who knows) childless women absolutely laying into mothers. And not just any mothers — their actual friends! Or should I say, ex-friends. Women they'd apparently loved right up until the moment they had a baby, at which point they became intolerable selfish bores.

Thousands of comments, most of them reading like an AA meeting for women who'd finally found the courage to admit they find their friends with kids absolutely insufferable.

"Hello my name is Moonpie1002 not to be confused with Moonpig and I hate my friends."

And I thought, wow… What's happening here then?

Why does this feel safe?

Why does this feel cool?

Why does this get rewarded?

Why has publicly dunking on mothers become so socially acceptable — trendy even?

As I said earlier, I've never been someone with 17,000 friends. You would, unlike the infamous lyric, not find me in the kitchen at parties. As a child, the only place you'd find me at parties was hiding behind my mum's legs. I wouldn't say I was shy. I just would have preferred to be eating prawn cocktail crisps anywhere but there and that really hasn't changed much.

I'm not really a joiner. I never have been.

I have a small handful of people I'd consider actual friends, and the majority of them are now also mums who unfortunately happen to be spread across the country, some in other countries entirely, so I don't get to see them regularly.

I don't have a friendship group that meets for coffee every week. I don't have a squad of women who call themselves aunties to my son and show up with matching t-shirts at his birthday parties to fight his actual auntie for first place auntie in his life. I don't have a legion of ladies writing "love these girls" captions under photos where everyone's wearing white linen and holding champagne. This has just never been me.

And still, since becoming a mother, I have said no to more things than I can count. I'm not exactly fighting off social invitations, but the invitations I do get, well, I've turned down a fair few of them.

I've organised my life around my child that much is true. But, and it's a big but… I am not boring.

Call me what you want, but do not call me that!

I'm full of opinions. I laugh at things. I have thoughts about the state of the world that have absolutely nothing to do with whether my son had a shit in his potty or ate his vegetables today (he didn't by the way, he never does, he lives off cheese, and I'm not exaggerating). I enjoy a glass (or a bottle, who am I kidding?) of wine and to dance like someone on drugs who has never actually tried drugs.

I love being amongst friends. I can hold a really good conversation about topics that aren't exclusively centred on motherhood. I am actually a fucking hoot. I contain multitudes, as they say.

We all do — us mothers. We are women whose lives have outwardly changed — obviously — but that does not make us boring. Well, some will be boring, but that's because they were already boring. We can't all be sparkling conversationalists. Someone has to be genuinely interested in hearing about your cousin's extension. That person exists, and they were boring before the baby arrived — the baby can't shoulder all the blame for that one!

So if we're not all boring bore fest yawn patrols (and we're not!) why do these people insist on calling us so?

What are they actually saying when they say this?

I've thought about this a lot — mulled it over and such. And I've come to the conclusion that I think what they're really saying is that we're no longer frictionless.

Which is tantamount to the same thing as being boring when you have the emotional maturity of a flannel.

But why does this work? Why does publicly trashing mothers earn you social capital instead of getting you labelled what you should be labelled, which is, a bit of a twat?

I keep thinking about the Cool Girl. Do you remember her? God she was exhausting, wasn't she?

The Cool Girl monologue from Gone Girl that I will never forget goes like this:

"Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size two, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want."

God damn, so iconic.

The woman who requires nothing, accommodates everything, and never disrupts the flow. Perpetually 25 — the kind of woman Leonardo DiCaprio would actually stick around for (or is that perpetually 24?).

Perpetually fun.

Perpetually easy.

And then, very swiftly, we all agreed she was humiliating. A pick-me. We retired her and sent her to therapy. Good riddance.

Except what if she didn't actually disappear? What if she just had a little rebrand? A glow up, if you will?

The new Cool Girl goes a bit like this…

She doesn't try to be chosen. She does the choosing. She has boundaries, she has standards, she has a notes app list titled "Non-Negotiables" and a water bottle the size of a small child named after a man that sounds more like a dog. She doesn't centre men — god no, that's pathetic. She centres herself — which is, we can all agree, objectively healthier. She will not shrink. She will not settle. She is moisturised. She is booked and busy.

She travels — a lot. She's the CEO of her own life. She doesn't have time for anyone who isn't matching her energy or meeting her where she's at or however that particular phrase goes. She cuts people off. Anyone who doesn't serve her highest self gets removed.

And, this is the crucial bit: she doesn't need anyone. The old Cool Girl needed men desperately — she just pretended she didn't. She performed being low-maintenance specifically so they'd choose her. She accommodated everything because she needed their validation.

The new Cool Girl doesn't need anyone. Or at least, that's the outward vibe. She's completely self-sufficient.

But the more I look at her, the more I wonder if this version is just the old one with better PR. Still curated — just not performing to men anymore. This one's performing for... what? The algorithm? Other women? Herself? All of the above? The audience might have changed somewhat, but the performance is still there.

You still have to prove something. You still have to show that you're not the wrong kind of woman. The old Cool Girl had to prove she wasn't demanding. The new Cool Girl has to prove she isn't dependent. And motherhood — visible, ordinary, "sorry I can't come to that" is pretty fucking dependent, isn't it?

I suppose this is where the comment section starts to make a bit more sense.

Because if the new Cool Girl's whole thing is self-sufficiency — emotional, financial, logistical, spiritual — then motherhood is the one state of being that blows a big fat fucking raspberry in the face of that aesthetic. It is needy. Not in a pathetic way, just in a very literal one. Someone needs you — all of the time and in ways that are not Cool Girl brand aligned.

And if you have built your identity, very reasonably, around not being swallowed, not being side lined, not being the woman who "lost herself", then watching your friend reorganise her entire life around a baby can feel like watching her step into the exact cautionary tale you've been oh so carefully avoiding.

So what do you do with that discomfort?

I don't know… You could sit with your thoughts and reflect on them. You could admit that maybe you're scared of that level of dependency. You could simply say you miss her. You could say it's strange and sad, and you don't quite know where you fit now (I saw one comment that said something along these lines — which BRAVO — you have emotional intelligence! The rest — yeah not so much).

Or — and this is much easier — you could call her boring.

"Boring" is efficient. "Boring" implies she changed for the worse. "Boring" suggests you didn't. "Boring" keeps you safely on the right side of the rebrand.

And when you say it so very publicly, when you type "I swear once they have a baby they have no personality left" and watch the likes roll in, you're reassuring everyone else watching that they are not that. You are not dull. You are not boring. You are not the Snoozefest Sisters, the Yawn Patrol, or the Tedium Tribe.

It is a statement that says I am not trapped. Look at me! I am still free, I am still fun, I have not allowed myself to be lost. I am still smooth. I am still easy. I am still frictionless.

And therefore, I am still valuable.

It's anxiety that comes from a culture that's still obsessed with whether women are desirable — socially, sexually, professionally. And motherhood complicates all of that in ways that are frankly very inconvenient if you're trying to maintain the image of being effortlessly cool.

And suddenly the worst thing you can be isn't oppressed — it's dull.

I don't think it's that these women actually hate their friends (though they're not doing a very good job of suggesting otherwise — seriously who needs enemies with friends like these?)

I think it's that culturally, as I have said many times before, dependency has become the one unforgivable flaw. And mothers — especially new mothers — are visibly dependent and visibly depended upon. We are entangled. Rearranged. Enmeshed. We are sometimes late, often tired, and sometimes unable to match the energy.

Which, in an era that seriously worships optimisation, looks a lot like failure.

So the safest way to prove you're still the Cool Girl is to draw a big fat public line between you and the friend who became a mother.

Could never be me, you say.

And everyone claps, because thank god, you're still frictionless.

Except… Nobody really gets to stay frictionless, do they?

At some point something will arrive that will rearrange you. Age does it. Illness does it. Grief does it. Redundancy does it. A parent needing care does it. Your own body refusing to cooperate does it.

Time is undefeated. We will all, eventually, become inconvenient. We will all, eventually, need someone. We will all have a season where we are not the sleekest version of ourselves — where we are tired, or slower, or scared, or dependent in ways that make us uncomfortable. Motherhood just does it earlier for some — and exceptionally visibly.

Motherhood drags the truth into the light that we are not self-contained machines but porous, needy, breakable humans long before some would like to admit it. So if you can position motherhood as a personality flaw — if you can reduce it to, oh, she's boring now — then you get to believe that what's happened to her is avoidable — not a fundamental part of the human condition.

Maybe we did ruin the groove.

But if the groove can't survive a baby… it wasn't that groovy baby.

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Feature Image: Supplied.